Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

The moon overhead poured light on a princely hall that sat amid untended shrubbery gone wild. Its arched doorway was staved in as if kicked by a giant. Every window had shattered, and the roof had collapsed. On the lintel above the entrance was carved a crescent moon. Though the manor house rose two stories and had wings flying back on each side, a coat of ice as clear as glass encased the entire building.

Vai sucked in a breath. The mare, taking his mood, sidestepped skittishly before he brought her back under control.

Not a single plant had woven its way inside, despite the age of the ruin. The smashed floor revealed the rubble of a hypocaust beneath. Intact corpses were caught and preserved within the ice as if they had been frozen as they tried to escape.

“Blessed Tanit!” I murmured. “Gracious Melqart, protect us. Noble Ba’al, watch over your faithful daughter.”

“The spirit knows this place because she visited here before in her other form.” Devyn signed a ward against evil tidings.

“I am not a ghost or a wolf,” I said in a choked voice, but he would not look at me. To look at his face slammed me with the axe blow of memory. As a child, I had looked into a similar face, my mother’s face, as she bent to kiss me. A scar had ripped a lightning-like seam across the right side of her face, and she was missing one eye. The hole gaped like a skull’s socket, a gate onto the pain she had suffered. Yet her expression was serene and loving.

“Tell no one. Keep silence,” she had murmured. “Just until we tell you we’ve reached the safe place we’re traveling to. Sleep, little cat. Your father and I are right here beside you.”

The memory opened a pit inside my heart. There was no safe place.

“Bad fortune to be here at midnight, haunted by spirits,” said Devyn. “Best we ride on.”

Vai did not budge. “This is the mage House that was destroyed by the Wild Hunt. Crescent House, it was called.”

“To this place the Hunt came, it is true, my lord. On Hallows’ Night, they were riding with claws and teeth. Bad fortune it is, my lord, to be lingering. Please let us be moving on.” He glanced toward me as if expecting me to turn into claws and teeth, and rend him.

I hated him for fearing me. The frozen shell of the House was a grave for those trapped within, woman, man, and child. The ice had spared no one.

“I am Tara Bell’s child!” In the muffled night my voice rang like a shout. “That’s why I look like her! I’m your niece!”

He looked at Vai. “I have no niece.”

“Don’t you understand?” I cried. “Don’t you see who—?”

“Silence!” Vai’s voice snapped.

I dragged in a bitter breath, fighting a flood of anger and an ebb of despair. Of course he was right: The last thing I needed to do now was make them more suspicious by informing them that their worst fears about me were true.

Devyn clipped his horse forward.

In a softer voice Vai said, “Catherine, I’m tired of the cold, love. I’m exhausted, and I hurt. I need to know you won’t freeze to death. Please, let’s get out of here.”

The sight of the ice-caged ruins and trapped corpses had truly shaken me, but it was his effort to disguise the tremor in his voice that made me realize that will alone was carrying him. I rode out of the ghost-ridden clearing, for I knew he would not leave if I did not go.

As if our movement unleashed it, the moon began its slide westward.

Soon the road passed pasture walls built of peat. If there were fields awaiting spring planting, I did not recognize them. Everything was strange to me. My moorings had slipped the dock and I had drifted free. I was riding the road my mother and father had traveled. We had just ridden past the estate where Camjiata’s wife, the dragon dreamer Helene Condé Vahalis, had been born and raised and had died. The general had been here, too, back in the days when he was merely Captain Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.

Why had it all happened? How had the four of them met: the ambitious captain, the loyal soldier, the half-blind oracle, and the restless traveler? Was there ever a reason, a destiny, as Camjiata claimed? Or were the Romans right that the goddess Fortuna was veiled and blind and therefore capricious?

We passed stone walls and winter-seared pasture. Barking dogs gave notice of habitation. Under the brilliant light of the moon rose long houses with peaked thatching, flanked by sheds with sloped roofs. Torchlight flared ahead. As we reached the village, Vai’s magic guttered the torches one by one. The doors leading into the houses opened, and dimly seen faces peered out. Although we didn’t need light on the night of the full moon, Vai extended his right hand in a gesture meant to be dramatic, and pinched four globes of light out of the air. Devyn mumbled a prayer.

We rode down a dirt street through the center of the village. In spring the main street would be nothing but a strip of sloppy mud. There were no modern chimneys, only smoke holes, and no glass windows set in the wattled walls. To judge by the bleating of sheep, the flocks were being wintered over in the same houses the people lived in. Two thousand years ago a Roman legion pressing forward to find tin, fur, and slaves for trade had probably seen the same sights we did now.

Had my mother truly come from this barbaric place? How different Daniel must have seemed to her, with his sophisticated education and his years of travel!

Watchmen paced us through the streets, holding their blackened torches. People slipped out of their homes to follow Vai’s mage light. We halted in front of a substantial house with a high roof. An elderly man dressed in an embroidered wool gown and a calf-length sleeveless leather tunic appeared on the porch. He greeted Vai with incomprehensible words.

o;The spirit knows this place because she visited here before in her other form.” Devyn signed a ward against evil tidings.

“I am not a ghost or a wolf,” I said in a choked voice, but he would not look at me. To look at his face slammed me with the axe blow of memory. As a child, I had looked into a similar face, my mother’s face, as she bent to kiss me. A scar had ripped a lightning-like seam across the right side of her face, and she was missing one eye. The hole gaped like a skull’s socket, a gate onto the pain she had suffered. Yet her expression was serene and loving.

“Tell no one. Keep silence,” she had murmured. “Just until we tell you we’ve reached the safe place we’re traveling to. Sleep, little cat. Your father and I are right here beside you.”